The greatest ally to despots and tyrants throughout history has been silence. But, as the observations of Peter Eng point out, when silence is broken—when the screams from the torture chambers and the cries of the oppressed are heard—a spotlight is focused on autocratic governments that gives them pause and makes them cautious.

During World War II, radio brought news to people from the stark battlefields and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Grainy black and white images of bodies crammed into gas chambers, piled high in prison yards, showed a brutality and death, unheard of, as they moved across movies screens around the world. In turn, American television revealed carpet-bombing along with the agony of a generation of young boys given up to the madness of war in Vietnam.

The result was an American public stunned, shocked, and left asking itself: “Is this all that American power is good for?” Who can forget the image of the young Vietnamese woman—scarred and screaming—as she ran naked down the street? Though, this woman’s image came from a silent photograph, her open mouth shouted a plea for justice that was louder than all the hundred thousand bombs dropped upon villages and hamlets in the name of “American pacification.”

Yet, the modern media with all its effectiveness pales in power—potential power—before the Internet. The modern media has always been used in the interest of big business and the elites who turned it, as much against their own people, as they did their enemies.

Case in point: as America was whipping up frenzy about the atrocities of the Germans, it was doing all it could to suppress any and all information about the lynching of Black Americans throughout the South. When McCarthyism swept over the country, it was the American media that poured it, seeping with innuendo, down up the nation. Never stopping once to ask if any of Senator McCarthy’s raving made any sense, every headline and newscast took up the cause of the “Red Menace” until no one was safe from suspicion.

Of course, there were voices raised in opposition to this frenzy. But these was never a match for the combined force of the American media. When the Red Menace was over, tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens were ruined—among the ruined was the African-American giant Paul Roberson!

The post-modern Internet has changed all of this. Today, thousands and thousands of websites threaten to make the pleas of the downtrodden and oppressed known to the world. And, as I have suggested in my article, NetWar, political leftists—progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries have taken to the new information technology with a vengeance.

Not since the invention of the printing press have the people of the world been privy to so much information. With the invention of the printing press, the Dark Ages was brought to an end. It was the progressive ideas contained in affordable books that also made the Renaissance and the Age of Reason possible. The discourse found in these books almost immediately caused problems for the ruling elites. When Martin Luther’s attack upon the Catholic Church reached the masses, through cheaply printed tracts, in Europe the Protestant Movement was born. Christianity was never the same.

In America, when the slave narratives were published the fledgling Anti-Slavery Movement was given fire—a fire that resulted in the Civil War.  When the screams of the black protesters at Pettus Bridge was heard in the capitols around the world, an American President was forced to come to terms with the reality of the Civil Rights Movement. The rights of the Democratic Age were presented to men not through the good intentions of the oppressor but only when the oppressor heard the screams of the oppressed in his ears and felt their bayonets pressed against his throat.

Fredrick Douglas once said, “Power concedes only to power!” If this is true, then the first power that the oppressed must claim for itself is the power to scream out against injustice. For, in that scream, is an acknowledgement of their humanity, a birth cry that portends the end of the Age of Oppression.

Now that websites are found in every corner of the world how can these cries ever be stifled anymore? Today, it is the cyber-activists of Southeast Asia. Yesterday, it was the Zapatistas of Mexico. What will tomorrow bring? Will a new international movement be born to bleed the capitalist, imperialist power structures to death from a thousand cuts?

Will a new Cyber-Internationale be sung in the ghettoes of the dawning post-industrial world? Will the pc rewrite Maoist dogma stating that political power not only precedes from the “barrel of a gun” but from the click of a mouse? Will Malcolm X’s declaration of freedom “by any means necessary” include revolutionary proclamations sent in the form of e-mails and found on listservs?

Some will, of course, doubt all of this. But the undeniable signs are there. As Peter Eng points out, even in the isolated jungles of the Third World Asia, the Internet has had a profound impact on how the oppressed struggle against the power of oppression:

But, it is not simply the contemporary capitalists who are feeling the effects of the new information technology on their political systems. The communists also have to cope with cyber-activism. As, Eng tells us, the government of Vietnam:

For five months in 1998, Eng explains, Vietnam’s mainstream media attempted to deny peasant protests against corruption by government officials. But, when the eyewitness accounts of these protests leaked out over the Internet, the Vietnamese government had to admit that they existed.

It is these cyber-activists ability to expose government corruption, nationally and internationally, that makes them so threatening to regimes of all classes. Sam Rainy—a pro-democracy advocate in Cambodia— was successfully able to “pressure for free and fair conditions for elections” through his party’s home page. And his website was also instrumental in publishing photographs of “anti-government demonstrators and other people” killed by the corrupt Hun Sen regime.

More recently, the London based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA) was able to successfully call for anti-government demonstrations in the politically conservative nation of Saudi Arabia. MIRA  leader, Saad al Fagih, states that he has been able to keep the reform movement in Saudi Arabia alive by the use of the Internet, cell phones, and a satellite radio station.

Democratic and reformists movements of expatriate citizens from autocratic governments are nothing new. National Fronts and Governments-in exile have dotted the political landscape for nearly a century. But what the new information technology has done is make these organizations much more effective and better known than they were some twenty or thirty years ago.

Previously, unless some fantastic event occurred, such as a military coup or terrorist act, most of these organizations remained well under the radar of the average person—even under the radar of other activists working for the same goal. But with the creation of the World Wide Web, anyone who possesses a pc, cell phone, or who can send a fax or an e-mail can become part of an electronic guerilla movement for reform. As Zarni, the leading pro-democracy activist of Burma puts it:

As it stands today, cyber-activism throughout the world is putting tremendous pressure on anti-democratic forces wherever they are found. Environmental, human rights, anti-globalization, indigenous rights workers have all found that the Internet can and does serve their interests in making worldwide reform possible. But more than any of these important movements, it is the pro-democracy cyber-activists of the Third World that may be poised to bring about the greatest change within the world.

For, if they are successful in overthrowing reactionary and autocratic governments, these information-based movements could effectively rewrite the entire political landscape. One can easily envision these Third World cyber-activists seizing power in their respective countries and moving forward to build new, freer, and more equitable nations. 

An alliance of such newly founded democratic governments would, undoubtedly, be a considerable counterforce to the New World Order as envisioned by the world’s only superpower—the United States of America. But, as stated before, these Third World activists will have to survive, flourish, and seize power in their own country before considering their future role in the world. Still, not since the socialist movement of the Industrial Age, has there been any movement as filled with hope and promise as the new cyber-activism found in the Third World today!

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update 27 June 2008